"What would you have said to her?" inquired Mrs. Friedland gently. "How can there be any possible doubt what I should have said to her?" said the doctor, slapping his knee. "'My dear, you love him--_ergo_, marry him!' That first and foremost. 'And as to those other trifles, what have you to do with them? Look over them--look round them! Rise, my dear, to your proper dignity and destiny--have a right and natural pride--in the rock that bore you! You, a child of the Greater Church--of an Authority of which all other authorities are the mere caricature--why all this humiliation, these misgivings--this turmoil? Take a serener--take a loftier view!' Ah! if I could evoke Fountain for one hour!" The doctor bent forward, his hands hanging over his knees, his lips moving without sound, under the sentences his brain was forming. This habit of silent rhetoric represented a curious compromise between a natural impetuosity of temperament, and the caution of scientific research. His wife watched him with a loving, half-amused eye. "And what, pray, could Mr. Fountain do, John, but make matters ten times worse?" "Do!--who wants him to do anything? But ten years ago he might have done something. Listen to me, Jane!" He seized his wife's arm. "He makes Laura a child of Knowledge, a child of Freedom, a child of Revolution--without an ounce of training to fit her for the part. It is like an heir--flung to the gypsies. Then you put her to the test--sorely--conspicuously. And she stands fast--she does not yield--it is not in her blood, scarcely in her power, to yield. But it is a blind instinct carried through at what a cost! You might have equipped and fortified her. You did neither. You trusted everything to the passionate loyalty of the woman. And it does not fail you. But----!" The doctor shook his head, long and slowly. Mrs. Friedland quietly replaced the rugs which had gone wandering, in the energy of these remarks. "You see, Jane, if it's true--'ne croit qui veut'--it's still more true, 'ne doute qui veut!' To doubt--doubt wholesomely, cheerfully, fruitfully--why, my dear, there's no harder task in the world! And a woman, who thinks with her heart--who can't stand on her own feet as a man can--you remove her from all her normal shelters and supports--you expect her to fling a 'No!' in the face of half her natural friends--and then you are too indolent or too fastidious to train the poor child for her work!--Fountain took Laura out of her generation, and gave her nothing in return. Did he read with her--share his mind with her? Never! He was indolent;-she was wilful; so the thing slid. But all the time he made a partisan of her--he expected her to echo his hates and his prejudice--he stamped himself and his cause deep into her affections----